Born in 1934 in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, Boston was the sixth
of eleven children his father came from Sierra Leone, and
his came from mother from Ireland. His ambition was to play
for Cardiff Rugby team, but it was Neath who took him under
his wing , Playing alongside him were Phil Jackson of Barrow,
Brian Gabbitas of Hunslet, and Jimmy Dunn of Leeds as well
as Phil Horrocks-Taylor, the future England rugby union
fly half. It was after seeing Boston score six tries in
the Army Cup Final against the Welsh Guards that Wigan signed
him for £3,000 on Friday 13 March, 1953, which was
not an unlucky day for rugby league; only for Hunslet, who
had been pursuing him since he was sixteen.

When Boston was touring Germany with an Army XV when the
news broke that he was to be one of Dickie Williams's Lions.
Boston was the first black player the British had ever taken
Down Under.
He was to make thirty-one test appearances for Great Britain
before he was through, and he scored twenty-four tries at
the highest level of the game. But it was for Wigan that
he racked up the points endlessly, twice scoring seven tries
in a match, against Dewsbury and Salford. Six times he went
to Wembley with them, thrice as winner, and when he played
his last match in the cherry and white, against Wakefield
Trinity at the end of April 1968, he had given them 478
tries across fifteen years. He had a couple of years with
Blackpool Borough before retiring as a fifteen-stone second-row
forward, with 571 tries for club and country to his name;
and only Brian Bevan had scored more in a British career.
In all he scored 571 tries in first class matches, the most
by any British player, and only surpassed by the Australian
Brian Bevan. In three seasons he scored 50 or more tries,
with 60 in 1956-1957. He played 31 games for Great Britain,
his last in 1963, scoring 24 tries. During his career, Wigan
appeared in six Challenge Cup finals, winning three times.

Billy Boston has served Wigan, the club and the town where
he settled, for most of his life. Today he can very often
be seen alongside the coaching team at Wigan's games.
The great measurement of Billy Boston's natural ability
is that after only six matches of rugby league, but he was
only nineteen years old and he was picked for the 1954 Lions'
tour Down Under. No one else ever came out of rugby union
so fast. No one so young had ever gone on tour before. No
one yet has scored his first century of rugby league tries
in only sixty-eight matches.